Categories:

Luminary journalists Ed Murrow, Martha Gellhorn, Walter Cronkite, and Clare Hollingworth were among the young reporters who chronicled World War II’s daily horrors and triumphs for Western readers. In this fascinating book, Ray Moseley, himself a former foreign correspondent who encountered a number of these journalists in the course of his long career, mines the correspondents’ writings to relate, in an exhilarating parallel narrative, the events across every theater—Europe, Pearl Harbor, North Africa, and Japan—as well as the lives of the courageous journalists who doggedly followed the action and the story, often while embedded in the Allied armies.

Moseley’s broad and intimate history draws on newly unearthed material to offer a comprehensive account both of the war and the abundance of individual stories and overlooked experiences, including those of women and African-American journalists, which capture the drama as it was lived by reporters on the front lines of history.

Ray Moseley enjoyed a long career as a foreign, diplomatic, and chief European correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, stationed in London, Washington, Berlin, Rome, Cairo, Belgrade, Moscow, and Nairobi. He lives in London.

“Reading this book is an engrossing experience. Not only has Moseley dug deeply and assiduously in the archives to retrieve some treasures which might have remained hidden but he has also managed to keep humanity in focus.”—Trevor Royle, Glasgow Herald

“Ray Moseley calls the Second World War the greatest news story of all time, and it is impossible to disagree… There is also heroism, and some brilliant writing, such as the description of Tokyo by George Weller of The Chicago Daily News as “an ashtray filled with the cigarette butts of buildings”. —Lewis Jones, Sunday Telegraph

“[Reporting War] tells the stories of dozens of correspondents from the United States and Allied nations. Moseley’s richly detailed narrative celebrates these men — and women — who put their lives on the line (and, all too often, lost them) to inform the folks back home about the day-to-day existence of infantrymen, slaughter on the beaches, bombers over Berlin, and concentration camp survivors. A deeply human and humane book, Reporting War is about fear and courage, competition for a scoop, pettiness and patriotism.”—Glenn Altschuler, Tulsa World

“A thorough volume for journalism and World War II collections, and for readers interested in tales of bravery.”—Library Journal